People talk about the movies
they see, and some people write about those movies for newspapers and
magazines. How does film studies, as an academic discipline, accord with
these more common ways of talking and thinking about films? The two ways
of thinking about film aren’t completely distinct, I think, but some
differences are worth noting.

First, ordinary discourse about
cinema centers on evaluative talk. “That movie was great! I loved it!”
“Really? I didn’t think it was very good.” Likewise film reviewers take as
their primary goal the evaluation of films, giving thumbs up or thumbs
down, saying whether they regard them as worth the ticket price or not.
Academic film studies can involve evaluation, but for most film scholars
evaluating a particular movie isn’t, or isn’t always, the goal.

Secondly, ordinary conversation tends to be ahistorical, in
the sense that this or that movie is not seen as part of a tradition or
long-range trend. Most reviewers follow this tendency; they typically
don’t have the space or the mind-set to put a film in the context of film
history. When a reviewer does invoke a historical context, it’s usually
the present: a reviewer often treats a film as reflecting current social
trends.

Third, and most important, typical talk about movies isn’t
very analytical. It doesn’t explore how the parts of the film relate to
one another in systematic ways; it doesn’t dissect strategies of plotting
or aspects of style; it doesn’t examine the ideological maneuvers the film
might execute. A reviewer might mention such factors, described more or
less evocatively (“jagged montage,” “incoherent motivation,” etc.) but
again, there is seldom the space, or the inclination, to probe such
matters.

Film studies, it seems to me, is an effort to understand films and the
processes through which they’re made and consumed. Film scholars mount
explanations for why films are the way they are, why they were made the
way they were, why they are consumed the way they are. Most ordinary talk
about movies, and most film journalism, doesn’t ask “Why…?” questions,
or pursue them very far.

Explaining anything involves analyzing it,
at least to some degree. Analysis is a matter of breaking up whole
phenomena into relevant parts and showing how they work together. Thus a
film historian interested in how a particular studio worked in 1930 will
distinguish among the studio’s operations (studio
departments, say, or phases of the moviemaking process). An academic film
critic will divide a film into parts (scenes, sequences, “acts”) to see
how the overall architecture works. Explaining something also involves
describing it. A film historian trying to explain how a studio functioned
in 1930 will describe the work routines; that’s a necessary part of the
explanation. An academic film critic will describe a scene in detail, for
that’s necessary to understanding why it carries a particular meaning or
achieves a particular effect. Analysis and description are rare in
ordinary conversation and in film reviewing because of limits of time and
space, but also because the film scholar is interested in something that
isn’t so pressing for other parties: explanations.

There are
different types of explanation. Historians often look for causal explanations, the way that events or circumstances x and y shaped event z
over time. Film analysts and theorists often seek functional explanations—how x and y work together, at any given moment, to create the
whole z. Again, these are concerns that typically don’t arise in ordinary
conversation or film reviewing.

When film scholars talk about
movies, they usually also offer interpretations: claims about the
nonobvious meanings that we can find in films. Interpretations can be
thought of as particular sorts of functional explanations. An
interpretation presupposes that aspects of the film (style, structure,
dialogue, plot) contribute to its overall significance. I argue this in
more detail in Making
Meaning.

Finally, I think that film studies is best
defined as a process of posing and trying to answer questions.
Most ordinary conversation about films serves
other purposes—to share information, to have social exchanges with
people, to learn more about others’ tastes. Film studies certainly has
these aims too, but like other academic disciplines, it seeks to answer questions
in a systematic way, one that is open to discussion and criticism. So film studies
centers on certain sorts of questions: those that require explanations as
answers.

One type of talk about movies resembles academic film
studies quite a lot, though: the talk of fans. Fan subcultures love to
describe their favorite scenes, often in great detail, and sometimes they
engage in analysis. Fans are also highly evaluative in their talk
(“Wasn’t the lightsabre duel cool?”), but in intriguing ways the
specialized discourse of fans runs parallel to that of academics. The
arguments mounted elsewhere on this website presume that theories,
historical arguments, and film analyses are efforts to mount persuasive
explanations which are, in turn, answers to particular questions.